If you ask me, the investigation of the whole wheat and sugar shortage investigation has been grossly mishandled. Making Wajid Zia investigate should have been a sure sign that positive results would be achieved. But instead of finding Nawaz Sharif guilty, he has turned on Jahangir Tareen and snapped at him. How dare a jumped-up copper say such mean things about the son of a peti bhira (yes, Tareen is the son of Allah Nawaz Tareen, who retired as a DIG, and is now deceased).
Now the big difference between Nawaz’s father, the late Mian Sharif, and Tareen’s father, is that the latter had a claim on Wajid Zia, so why this disregard for the common human decencies?
I can ascribe this disregard of the milk of human kindness to global warming and other climate change phenomena, or else to the COVID-19 pandemic. True, the man who chaired the meeting that precipitated the sugar crisis was Asad Umar, then Finance Minister, and the man in charge of handling the pandemic here is him. So we might dimly discern where we’re going here. Well, maybe he’s doing this because he wants us to forget the sugar and wheat shortages. Y’know, when your attempts to combat the pandemic have left so many people dead, you won’t have to explain things like a wheat or sugar shortage.
All Tareen is supposed to have done is to get the government to pay him money to export sugar. He didn’t hoard it, did he? Now that was done by the unholy combination of Saad Rafique, Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, and Hamza Shahbaz. Or was it Shahbaz and Nawaz who personally sat over the sacks of sugar, collecting the money from eager shopkeepers personally? Perhaps the merry men at NAB can make a decision. They won’t be able to produce evidence, as they haven’t done in many cases recently, especially where the PML-N men have been concerned.
Anyway, there’s got to be something wrong with a system that lets a fine upstanding anti-corruption crusader like Jehangir Tareen get his reputation besmirched while corrupt elements walk about freely. Did they ever win anything for Pakistan? Or support anyone who did? Azam Khan, we’re all looking at you.
Imran Khan has got other things on his mind. Like finding a cure for corona. Contrary to much experimentation by a dedicated group of researchers, coke doesn’t do the trick. Nor does sniffing sugar. Y’know, sugar and coke have something in common. They’re both white crystalline powders, and both give a high. Sugar, though, is not an anesthetic.
Imran is also bothered by the withdrawal of Senator Bernie Sanders from the US Democratic presidential nomination race. Imran was fascinated by someone who was 78 years old, but got the youth vote. Well, Imran is not yet 70, but he will be close by the time of the next election in 2023, and he needs to know how to get the youth vote at that point.
Perhaps the secret will be to convince those who voted for him in 2018 that they are still young, and must vote for the PTI, not growing up and having to move onto mature things, liking voting for Bilawal, who will then be 35.
Hopefully, there will be enough people left to vote. After all, though Imran is taking such good care of the poor as to give them money, the absence of social distancing at them means that the cure might be worse than the illness. It would be turn-up for the books if the government’s measures proved to be the means of spreading the sickness.
Of course, we probably won’t need the government for that. What with the overcrowding in the slums, the poor, who need the support to survive social distancing, are probably going to be able to spread the disease among themselves without the government helping.
Still, it’s a disease that doesn’t need that much help. It’s already killed over 100,000 people, a number which was crossed by Saturday morning. And over here, there’s 88 people dead. But wait. We’ve been avoiding testing, on the plea that we don’t have enough kits. So that must mean that there’s a lot of infection out there, and we’ll only find out when people start keeling over and dying.
